We have LIVE CHAT!

We have made it even easier for you to communicate with us!

We have added live chat capabilities to the site. Now, if one of our experts is connected, you can simply click the “Start Chat” link and order products, ask questions, or give your feedback.

We expect this will help us communicate better with everyone interested in learning more about glyconutrients and what we do as social entrepreneurs.

The chat is made possible by the “Custom Google Talk Chatback” plugin. It interfaces with GTalk.

Added Captcha Plugin

Last year (March of 2010) we reported that we had closed comments on posts that were generating the greatest amount of spam.

Comment spam is very sophisticated and it forces us to have to read every entry with great detail to determine if the comment was automated or in fact placed there by a human.

Disabling comments on specific posts worked for a few months but we noticed that some of these bots would crawl the site looking for more posts with open comments. We then decided to automatically close comments on posts that were more than 2 weeks old. This almost eliminated the comment spam but it presented a huge problem for our users…

We have a monthly recognition for people in the organization who qualify for leadership levels and bonuses for the first time. Some people would like to be able to congratulate those being recognized. We wanted to leave comments open indefinitely so team members could congratulate anyone at any time.

The Solution
We installed the SI Captcha plugin. Now all comments from bots are no longer accepted because they are unable to type the characters displayed by the captcha image. We have opened comments on all posts that were originally intended for reader interaction.

Limit on Comments

Most of the pages on GlycoTrainer.com do not allow user comments. Comments are only allowed on special articles. Our intention was to keep the comments open indefinitely. But we never anticipated the hundreds of spam messages that would pour in on a daily basis. This makes it near impossible to identify real comments.

We have enabled a feature that will close comments on posts that are older than 14 days. We hope this will also encourage our readers to be proactive and post comments at a more relevant time.

Revisions

Back on May 18^th we posted a list of problems that needed to be fixed on GlycoTrainer.com.

All but two issues have been resolved. Well, one is an issue, the other is a page that we want to add.

We have decided to create this new post because of issues we discovered while fixing those previously listed.

First, the two that carried over from the previous list:

• Borders on left and right navigation menus do not appear round in IE8 or Chrome (they do in FireFox)
• Will add a positive feedback page, as most of our pending comments are just that (encouraging messages that are not responses to any particular post)

Next, the newly discovered issues:

• Fix formatting issues on ALL pages and posts (includes adding text formatting such as bold and italics)
• Add link to Spanish version on category pages
• Remove Pumas information from font page
• Remove Pumas blog
• Verify all posts and pages exist on the sitemap
• Verify all previously posted glycophrases exist on the glycophrases page
• Make it so that comments are only open for 14 days after posts are created (on the few posts where comments are allowed)

Additions we would like to see:

• Create new template for recognition pages
• Video content on all pages
• Storefront/Marketplace
• Conference Information Page

If you have suggestions on things that we should change/fix, please contact us.

Tweet This! Added

Sociable Toolbar

We have made it even easier for you to share an article with your friends. We added the a quick, one-click way to tweet “Just read this article and thought U should also: [ARTICLE URL]“.

This seemed like the most logical step given our constant interaction on twitter through @glycotrainer. (Please follow us)

Revisions

GlycoTrainer.com was redesigned on November of 2009.

Our “Site Redesign” post included many errors that were immediately identified. All but one of those problems have been resolved.

The pending problem is: “The content boxes on the only show up as intended when viewing with FireFox 3.5 on Linux. Heights are not uniform when page is loaded on FF 3.5 or IE 8 on Windows (tested on XP and Windows 7)“

Additional problems have been identified since. These include:

• Images display for some but not all of the category display pages
• Tags displayed on front page and at the bottom of posts are confusing users and make the pages look crowded
• Remove author from posts
• Borders on left and right navigation menus do not appear round in IE8 or Chrome (they do in FireFox)
• Most Popular section on left column only displays 2 and not 3 as it used to (and as it should)
• International section will be moved from left to right column as it is currently too small for most page titles
• Will add a positive feedback page, as most of our pending comments are just that (encouraging messages that are not responses to any particular post)
• As pointed out on the “Site Search Fixed” post, our current search works independently in English and Spanish. In other words, if you are viewing an English page you will only get English results

These are the immediate changes we will make to the site. If you have suggestions on things that we should change/fix, please contact us.

Closed Comments

We went through old posts that were no longer being commented on and we disabled the comments. There is an insane amount of spam coming through and this will eliminate a lot of that.

We also limited the number of months displayed under “Monthly Archives” at the bottom of the page. Before, it simply displayed ALL months that contained posts. Now it will only display the last 5 months that have posts.

Site Search Fixed

Turns out the fix was quite simple.

The theme we are using does not specify in which directory to search. All that needed to be done was to indicate a directory.

This is what the declaration of the form looked like:
<form id=”searchformtop” method=”get” action=”">

This is what is what it now looks like:
<form id=”searchformtop” method=”get”
action=”http://www.glycotrainer.com/”>

Because we are running a different install for each language, the default search does not search another language’s database. We realize that at some point we will have to fix this.

Guest Authors on GlycoTrainer.com!

In an effort to get more, unbiased content, we have added a new category to GlycoTrainer.com.

The Guest Authors category will serve as an archive for third party articles. The authors of these articles have no affiliation with the Glyco Trainer organization but realize there is value in extending their knowledge to our visitors. This is new for 2010 aim to have at least one article by a guest author per month. If things go well, and user feedback is positive we will continue with this in 2011 and probably a little more aggressively (maybe one a week). Time will tell.

For the first such post, Liz Schau from www.DearThyroid.org reported on Sore Throats in Thyroid and Autoimmune Patients. Thank you, Liz!

If you have a nutrition or health website and would like to submit an article, please contact us. The format will be just like this, where “Related Links” have two links directed to GlycoTrainer.com and one link directed to a post of your choice (as long as it’s nothing illegal or pornography). Publishing a post on our site is free of charge, and the process (at least with Liz and the rest of the DearThyroid.org people) went pretty smooth.

Just Cleaned Up Our Blog

Our Official Blog, as any website or piece of software, requires maintenance.

We have done our first official maintenance job! Yes! Here is a list of what we did:

• Removed irrelavent posts
• Fixed broken images
• Checked ALL outbound links
• Corrected outdated details

Thank you for reading our blog. If you come across any grammar, spelling, or technical errors on ANY of our sites, please contact us and let us know.